Darwin gets lost in shopping mall on the way to procreate

BOOK REVIEW: Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerismby Geoffrey Miller jnr. William Heinemann; £20 (€23)

UNAPOLOGETIC SHOPPERS, confused single people and hapless marketers alike will be both intrigued and unnerved by this brilliant, thoughtful and entertaining critique of consumerist culture.

After years of fashionable sneering that other consumers (never ourselves) are shallow, indulgent creatures who shop to fill the holes in their personality, the retail world’s repeat customers may at first be heartened by one of the central premises of Spent: that runaway consumerism is a facet of evolution. Yes, we’re actually shopping to ensure the survival of the human species. How fabulous.

Our latent motive for shopping is not to feel good, but to look good, writes Geoffrey Miller, a professor in evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico. He’s not just talking about the cosmetics counter. Consumers unconsciously flaunt the biological and cultural “fitness indicators”, or desirable personality traits, that have proven success in helping us get into bed with someone we deem to be of high enough genetic quality to want their babies. (For women, this gives new meaning to the phrase “shop till you drop”.)

In truth, Spent is not a manifesto for rampant retail frenzy – far from it. Consumerist capitalism “makes us forget our natural adaptations for showing off desirable fitness-related traits”. Our biological impulses have maladapted into narcissistic delusions. Consumerism allows us to send “fake” signals, but these always get found out because human beings have evolved to accurately assess other humans’ personalities with uncanny accuracy.

This is why the quality of long-term relationships is rarely influenced by one’s product purchases. The $40,000 (€28,629) Porsche really is a good predictor of a $400,000 divorce. Constant trait display in the mating process is also what makes the end of a relationship feel like failing an exhausting audition and why, as people get older, they adopt more conformist, conservative choices of wardrobe, music, political ideologies, etc. There’s just no evolutionary need to show off any more. Miller qualifies that he is not interested in giving science’s “seal of approval” to consumerism: he does not want to “naturalise” consumerism in the way that racist 19th century social Darwinists, right-wing Chicago School economists and evangelical marketers do. Nor does he ally himself with Marxists, anti-globalisation activists and New Age sentimentalists who blame consumerism on oppressive institutions.

Marketers miss a few tricks, according to Miller. They know consumers strive semi-consciously to display their wealth, status and taste, but they don’t understand that they do so largely to reveal more fundamental biological virtues: the well-established “Big Five” personality traits that, along with general intelligence, explain all human behaviour. Miller lists the “Big Five” as openness (novelty seeking, broadmindedness, interest in culture), conscientiousness (willpower, trustworthiness), agreeableness (warmth, kindness, empathy), stability (adaptability, maturity, stress resistance) and extraversion (assertiveness, social self-confidence).

So a car with a strong “brand personality” like BMW appears to connote high intelligence, high extraversion but low agreeableness (aggressive, dominant behaviour), while pets and plants are reliable “conscientiousness” indicators that enhance the social and sexual appeal of single people.

Similarly, the tech-savvy may unconsciously respond to the product specifications of an iPod not as useful features they would enjoy, but impressive properties that they’ll be able to talk about in “impressively articulate, IQ-displaying ways”.

There is a fun 10-question way to measure whether you are high, low or averagely endowed with these traits. But surprisingly, says Miller, most marketers have no idea how well the “Big Five” can predict consumer behaviour.

It is partly because evolutionary psychology’s own “signal failure” has placed it uncomfortably close to a social Darwinism (the ugly misrepresentation of Darwin that became the ideology of 20th century eugenicists), that the marketing world ignores its insights, Miller argues. Marketers are comfortable with stereotyping people according to their nation, religion, class and sex, but it would be a public relations disaster were these patterns of consumer behaviour to be attributed to meaningful, heritable, psychological differences between groups.

One of the joys of Spent is that you don’t have to agree with Miller’s provocative suggestions for how to get off the consumerist merry-go-round. Instead, you can think about the traits you displayed with your recent purchases and imagine a future shopping list designed, consciously this time, to display the traits you may be lacking in. No doubt self-help books and consumer magazines will soon be falling over themselves to give us more explicit product recommendations based on Miller’s thesis. In the meantime, we have Spent, a serious book about science that is nevertheless happy to flit from grand idea to satirical punchline. Spent is not quite “Darwin Goes to the Mall”: it’s Darwin was on his way to get laid, but somehow found that he was trapped in a giant department store, desperately searching for the exit.